U.S. President Donald Trump has contacted Apple about changing Lake Ontario’s name to “Lake America” on its maps app, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on Monday.
In an interview on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria program, Burgum said: “The president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change coming up soon to Lake America.”
National Post has reached out to Apple for comment.
It comes after the “Lake America” label was adopted by Google Maps in the U.S. over the weekend. The company said in a post on its corporate website that the change was made after the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) had formally renamed the lake….
A newly incorporated organization is working to support Black politicians across Canada as they continue to face challenges with representation and discrimination.
The Canadian Congress of Black Politicians formally announced it was incorporated as a national organization this month.
Liberal MP Michael Coteau, who helped to assemble the group about a decade ago, told a press conference last week that it’s “refreshing” to see growth in the organization.
“This organization was established to build a network across the country so Black politicians from all levels of government and from all political stripes could come together,” he said.
The non-partisan group says it’s the only national organization that represents Black elected officials. With 150 members across the country in all levels of government, the congress encourages collaboration and mentorship and works to strengthen Black political representation and advocate for issues that affect Black communities across Canada.
“Those who want to do this work, be in elected office, there is a support system and there is an organization that is there for them now and going forward,” Colleen James, the group’s chair and councillor for the region of Waterloo, said at a press conference last week…
A constitutional lawyer is seeking to strike down a 2022 Quebec law that abolished the mandatory Oath of Allegiance to the King for members of the province’s National Assembly, arguing the provincial government overstepped its constitutional powers.
The application was filed in Quebec Superior Court in Montreal on Monday by the Public Interest Litigation Institute and its founder, Lawrence David, who teaches at University of Ottawa’s faculty of law.
The lawsuit names the Attorney General of Quebec as the respondent and the Attorney General of Canada as an interested party….
Appreciate this data-based approach. Interesting finding and also interesting that political party bias only formed about five percent of total:
…The data can help us understand the subjects where the CBC most frequently issues corrections, especially when it comes to the broadcaster leaning in a consistent ideological direction. CBC has oftenbeenaccused of ideological bias against both the Conservative Party and conservatives more broadly. As such, I sought to determine how often partisanship or ideology appeared in CBC’s corrections.
In total, only 10 of the 209 correction notices involved Liberals or Conservatives, or liberalism or conservatism more broadly. Two were minor technical corrections for which partisanship or ideology was incidental. Of the remaining eight, two concerned Liberals and six concerned conservatives. Strikingly, all eight errors ran in the same political direction.
One of the two Liberal-related corrections involved a prematurely celebratory headline that initially declaredCanada was “finally getting” a national food program when the Liberal government had merely announced one it hoped to introduce later that year. The other put words in the mouth of a prominent Conservative when a CBC fact-check video falselysaidthat former Conservative cabinet minister Stockwell Day and others had blamed the Liberal government for changes to Poilievre’s riding boundaries. The source material contained no such accusation. CBC’s correctionomitted that context, leaving Day unnamed and admitting only that the video had wrongly said “some” blamed the Liberal government.
The remaining six corrections followed the same pattern: all involved reporting that portrayed conservatives unfavourably. The errors were as follows:
Reporting that Conservative officials had physically pushed the assistant of floor-crossing MP Chris D’Entremont, when they had pushed open a door.
Imprecisely linking alleged pressure by India on Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner to her decision to leave Patrick Brown’s leadership campaign, without initially noting that she denied being pressured.
Challenging a Conservative housing affordability video using average mortgage costs, even though the claim was based on median income and total homeownership costs.
Quoting a professor’s distorted characterization of Charlie Kirk’s remarks about black women and gay people, without describing what Kirk had actually said.
Publishing quotes from a Facebook post by Conservative MP Rachael Harder in a way CBC later called “potentially misleading” with insufficient context.
As noted above, publishing a story from an election worker that generalized hateful attitudes to conservative parties and voters more broadly.
Most of the corrections were modest, and, taken together, eight cases hardly prove systemic bias. But the political tilt of the reporting was uniform: one error favoured the Liberals, and the other seven portrayed conservatives unfavourably….
Yet another tech bro with anti-democratic tendencies:
Canadians who don’t pay income tax and pensioners shouldn’t have the right to vote, according to the CEO and co-founder of e-commerce company Shopify.
In a post on X, Tobias Lutke endorsed a plan that would strip millions of Canadians of the right to vote. A post by a retired banker suggested proportional voting based on the level of income tax paid.
“What about weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay? (no income tax paid – 0 vote, $1-100k – 1 vote, $100-200k 2 votes and so on… cap it at 5 votes for $500k+. For those that constantly complain about the wealthy not paying tax/fair share they’d have nothing to worry about right? Why not reward representation of taxation and build a democracy around those that foot the bill?” wrote Eric Thor.
To which Lutke replied, “Good system,” adding in another post, “Reward productive people with leverage.”…
Of note: Gender parity, 2 visible minorities, 1 Indigenous.
Comparison table below:
….The new members bring a sound understanding of the parliamentary and legislative process, which will allow them to provide high quality recommendations to the Prime Minister about who could contribute to the work of the Senate. Adding to the constitutional requirements, the members will be focused on recommendations that will achieve greater expertise in the Senate on the emerging issues and challenges facing Canada including trade, finance, artificial intelligence and technology, diplomacy and foreign affairs, criminal justice and community safety and strategic Canadian capabilities and industries.
Will continue to track nominations. As mentioned, selection of non-partisan appointments equally telling of government priorities:
…Now here we are in 2026, with a majority Liberal government and a Senate stacked with Liberal and Liberal-leaning senators, and Mr. Carney has made it clear that the good old days of unapologetic partisanship are back.
And yet there is still no Liberal caucus in the Senate to identify those past and future Liberal appointees as what they are: an extension of the government of the day, waiting for its marching orders.
The Senate may have finally reached its nadir – an unelected house stuffed with political appointees who can feign independence and thus shield the government from the consequences of their decisions.
If Liberal senators are going to function as Liberal senators, Canadians deserve the honesty of calling them that. Mr. Carney has cheapened democracy with his actions. He needs to restore the Liberal caucus in Senate to undo the damage.
Most of the commentary has understandably focussed on the formal removal of non-partisanship in appointments. But little has been said regarding the diversity of appointments, whether of minority groups, sectoral or ideological. While the initial four appointments are too few to establish a trend, half are political, three-quarters are men, one visible minority but no Indigenous. The two non-political appointees appear to be more centrist than some of the activist senators appointed under the Trudeau government:
The chamber of sober second thought is apparently too sober for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s liking, and tends to waste all kinds of time in second thought. What it needs, we are told, is more party loyalists.
So Mr. Carney appointed his principal secretary and campaign manager, Tom Pitfield, to the Senate, alongside Conservative MP Richard Martel, 65, who bolted from Pierre Poilievre’s joyless Conservative caucus for another nine years and eight months of job security.
But the PM also changed the appointment process for new senators to remove the nominal requirement of non-partisanship, thus opening the door wide to former politicians, aides and fundraisers.
It seems strange for a Prime Minister with so little partisan history of his own, but it was not the first time Mr. Carney has removed restrictions on partisanship in power. Last year, he loosened rules on the government spending on partisan ads – and now Mr. Carney’s Canada Strong campaign slogan is often heard in TV commercials.
…Trudeau was wise, I thought, to stop putting hacks, fundraisers and failed candidates into the upper chamber, and he never had to deal with any blowback.
The backroom fixers in the Liberals and Conservatives are glad to see Carney set aside Trudeau’s reforms, offering thin arguments about political tradition, but that is because they and their friends want to get in there.
It looks dirty, and Carney will wear it if these appointments go wrong.
One view is that by allowing Permanent Residents to participate in candidate selection, political parties are facilitation overall integration. In discussions I have had on political representation benchmarks, some have maintained that the overall benchmark should be the number of both citizens and Permanent Residents, rather than citizens only. I favour citizens only and Sarkonak is correct to note the pandering nature and related electoral strategies:
…Well, we’ll see how the investigation goes. Already, some onlookers are gloating, seeing Erskine-Smith’s loss as a strike of karmic justice.
Erskine-Smith was absolutely one of them. He participated in Bangladeshi flag-raisings at city hall; he dressed up in the cultural garb. When he talks about immigration, he speaks in economic terms, not cultural terms. He speaks of the tide of asylum seekers as if they’re an inevitable force of nature, and of his desire to “regularize” the status of people who are in Canada illegally — a point so radical that even the CEO of the Century Initiative told him it’s not worth talking about.
But the conservatives out there should limit their gloating and use the moment to get their own house in order. They engage in diaspora politics all the same.
Without getting into any specific ridings, it’s not unusual for nomination races to be co-opted by diaspora interests. Conservative or Liberal.
Just as Liberals allow non-citizens to vote in their nominations, Conservatives do, too. When some members of the party sought to end the practice of allowing permanent residents to participate in nomination votes, they were shut down by the rest. This is a clear vector for foreign interference.
If individual parties can’t be trusted to ensure that the gears of democracy are turned by citizens only, then their hands should be forced by legislation. And at a higher level, they need to learn that diaspora pandering is like walking through a field of rakes. It might not whack you in the face today, but there’s always a risk it will — just ask Erskine-Smith.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out given current public opinion given the excessive numbers of the Liberal government (now being reversed) but there is a “more the merrier” crowd of settlement organizations, education institutions, academics and some in the business community:
…“We are calling very clearly for a single-tier immigration system, based on permanent residency and status on arrival, that gives rights and stability—like our grandparents received when they first came to this country. We need an immigration system that reunites families, welcomes refugees fleeing wars around the world, and does not create two classes of workers.
We will reverse Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cuts to immigration levels. Through Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, we will hire 3,000 immigrant caseworkers immediately to address the backlog of 1 million immigrant applications that are stuck and going nowhere.
We will end provincial rules that restrict and tie foreign workers to specific employers. We will end limits based on sector, hours, occupation, or category—restrictions that make workers vulnerable. We believe we should create a network of reception centres for refugees across the country, with real funding for shelters and housing. We also need to fix credentialling problems. Many people come to Canada because of their skills, but credentialling issues prevent them from using the skills they brought with them.”
